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The Sword is an American heavy metal band from Austin, Texs. Formed in 2003, the band is composed of vocalist and guitarist John D. Cronise, guitarist Kyle Shutt, bassist Bryan Richie, and drummer Santiago "Jimmy" Vela III. Originally signed to New York-based independent label Kernado Records, the group released its debut album Ages Of Winters, which was largely written by Cronise before the band's formation, in 2006.

Almost a decade before one Steve Harris would start up what was to become one of the more successful Heavy Metal bands still around (somewhere in 1966 to be more precise, bassist Barry Skeels, singer Steve Drewett and guitarist Chris Rose (whom had that far been active in an acoustic band) witnessed a performance of Cream at their school hall in Basildon (Southern border of Sussex, some 50 km East from the center of London)!

Soleil Moon Is only a duo, formed by singer Larry King (current singer in the Michael Thompson Band) and keyboardist John Blasucci (current keyboarder with Dennis DeYoung (ex Styx)). Of course for this record they were assisted by other talented musicians like Leland Sklar, Michael Thompson and others.

Are you ready for some dirty motherfucking classic rock? Ok, so far so good. But what we get on a musical level is not bad at all and could be described as a bastard between Clutch, The Sword and COC. The true influences are a lot deeper and hail from the glorious seventies, the direction they have taken, though, can be best described with the mentioned bands and gives you some ideas what Mos Generator are all about. Rough and earthy riff rock it is, almost ideal to cruise through the country side.

Oh my, changes, changes...that certainly is a theme here! First of all, changes in my professional life caused the review of this album (as well as some 50 others) to be somewhat delayed, as those changes caused me to attract writers' block.

While I had been pleasantly surprised by the first two Issa albums, this new album was short of a deception to me. Despite the fact that she has chosen songs from some well known melodic/AOR/hard rock artists like Mark Free, Aviator, 21 Guns, Atlantic and other bands, and has reworked them, it is a rather weak album.

Down, who still play their typical mix of sludge metal and classic rock, prefer to take their time. The band started already back in 1991, but The Purple is only their fourth album to date. The difficulty in judging this album is that I started to like it after quite some effort to dig and try to find interesting elements In the beginning it sounded rather typical and my initial impression was that few things were going on.